Historically, document review during the discovery phase of litigation and for other types of legal matters, such as due diligence and regulatory compliance, have been conducted manually. During document review, individual reviewers, generally licensed attorneys, are assigned sets of documents for coding. A reviewer must carefully study each document and categorize the document by assigning a code or other marker from a set of descriptive classifications, such as “privileged,” “responsive,” and “non-responsive.” The classifications affect the disposition of each document, including admissibility into evidence. During discovery, document review can potentially affect the outcome of the underlying legal matter, so consistent and accurate results are crucial.
Manual document review is tedious and time-consuming. Marking documents is solely at the discretion of each reviewer and inconsistent results may occur due to misunderstanding, time pressures, fatigue, or other factors. A large volume of documents reviewed, often with only limited time, can create a loss of mental focus and a loss of purpose for the resultant classification. Each new reviewer also faces a steep learning curve to become familiar with the legal matter, coding categories, and review techniques.
Currently, with the increasingly widespread movement to electronically stored information (ESI), manual document review is no longer practicable. The often exponential growth of ESI exceeds the bounds reasonable for conventional manual human review and underscores the need for computer-assisted ESI review tools.
Conventional ESI review tools have proven inadequate to providing efficient, accurate, and consistent results. For example, DiscoverReady LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, conducts semi-automated document review through multiple passes over a document set in ESI form. During the first pass, documents are grouped by category and basic codes are assigned. Subsequent passes refine and further assign codings. Multiple pass review also requires a priori project-specific knowledge engineering, which is useful for only the single project, thereby losing the benefit of any inferred knowledge or know-how for use in other review projects.
Thus, there remains a need for a system and method for increasing the efficiency of document review that bootstraps knowledge gained from other reviews while ultimately ensuring independent reviewer discretion.